Hi Kevin, Jose et al, We use version control (git) + to write papers in the lab. It works fine but handling merge conflicts is still difficult; the chaps in the lab are all very computer literate but I regularly have to help out with a broken merge. It's certainly too complicated for me to insist on with external collaborators. For them I initially suggested LyX + track changes. However LyX's track changes plays very poorly with VCS in LyX 1.6.X and this is only partly solved in 2.0.
The beauty of real time editing is that it handles merge conflicts in a way that is easy to understand and really pretty transparent. Of course for it to be transparent, there has to be a clear way to see who (and ideally when) last edited any piece of text. For my group and colleagues beyond the lab, collaborative editing (a la SubEthaEdit) would be the killer feature that would really expand the audience for LyX. I hope that at some point this will resonate with one of the developers with the skills to implement this kind of feature. Best, Greg. -- Gregory Jefferis, PhD Division of Neurobiology MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 0QH, UK. http://www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/group-leaders/h-to-m/g-jefferis http://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/directory/profile.php?gsxej2 http://flybrain.stanford.edu
